Annotating media content for automatic content understanding

ABSTRACT

A system for annotating frames in a media stream  114  includes a pattern recognition system (PRS)  108  to generate PRS output metadata for a frame; an archive  106  for storing ground truth metadata (GTM); a device to merge the GTM and PRS output metadata and thereby generate proposed annotation data (PAD)  110 ; and a user interface  109  for use by the human annotator HA  118 . The user interface  104  includes an editor  111  and an input device  107  used by the HA  118  to approve GTM for the frame. An optimization system  105  receives the approved GTM and metadata output by the PRS  108 , and adjusts input parameters for the PRS to minimize a distance metric corresponding to a difference between the GTM and PRS output metadata.

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED PATENT APPLICATION

This patent application claims a benefit to the priority date of the filing of U.S. Provisional Patent Application Ser. No. 61/637,344, titled “System for Annotating Media Content for Improved Automatic Content Understanding Performance,” by Petajan et al., that was filed on Apr. 24, 2012 and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/836,605, titled “System For Annotating Media Content For Automatic Content Understanding” by Petajan et al., that was filed on Mar. 15, 2013. The disclosures of U.S. 61/637,344 and U.S. Ser. No. 13/836,605 are incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.

FIELD OF THE DISCLOSURE

This disclosure relates to media presentations (e.g. live sports events), and more particularly to a system for improving performance by generating annotations for the media stream.

BACKGROUND OF THE DISCLOSURE

A media presentation, such as a broadcast of an event, may be understood as a stream of audio/video frames (live media stream). It is desirable to add information to the media stream to enhance the viewer's experience; this is generally referred to as annotating the media stream. The annotation of a media stream is a tedious and time-consuming task for a human. Visual inspection of text, players, balls, and field/court position is mentally taxing and error prone. Keyboard and mouse entry are needed to enter annotation data but are also error prone and mentally taxing. Accordingly, systems have been developed to at least partially automate the annotation process.

Pattern Recognition Systems (PRS), e.g. computer vision or Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), process media streams in order to generate meaningful metadata. Recognition systems operating on natural media streams always perform with less than absolute accuracy due to the presence of noise. Computer Vision (CV) is notoriously error prone and ASR is only useable under constrained conditions. The measurement of system accuracy requires knowledge of the correct PRS result, referred to here as Ground Truth Metadata (GTM). The development of a PRS requires the generation of GTM that must be validated by Human Annotators (HA). GTM can consist of positions in space or time, labeled features, events, text, region boundaries, or any data with a unique label that allows referencing and comparison.

A compilation of acronyms used herein is appended to this Specification.

There remains a need for a system that can reduce the human time and effort required to create the GTM.

SUMMARY OF THE DISCLOSURE

We refer to a system for labeling features in a given frame of video (or audio) or events at a given point in time as a Media Stream Annotator (MSA). If accurate enough, a given PRS automatically generates metadata from the media streams that can be used to reduce the human time and effort required to create the GTM. According to an aspect of the disclosure, an MSA system and process, with a Human-Computer Interface (HCI), provides more efficient GTM generation and PRS input parameter adjustment.

GTM is used to verify PRS accuracy and adjust PRS input parameters or to guide algorithm development for optimal recognition accuracy. The GTM can be generated at low levels of detail in space and time, or at higher levels as events or states with start times and durations that may be imprecise compared to low-level video frame timing.

Adjustments to PRS input parameters that are designed to be static during a program should be applied to all sections of a program with associated GTM in order to maximize the average recognition accuracy and not just the accuracy of the given section or video frame. If the MSA processes live media, the effect of any automated PRS input parameter adjustments must be measured on all sections with (past and present) GTM before committing the changes for generation of final production output.

A system embodying the disclosure may be applied to both live and archived media programs and has the following features:

-   -   Random access into a given frame or section of the archived         media stream and associated metadata     -   Real-time display or graphic overlay of PRS-generated metadata         on or near video frame display     -   Single click approval of conversion of Proposed Annotation Data         (PAD) into GTM     -   PRS recomputes all metadata when GTM changes     -   Merge metadata from 3rd parties with human annotations     -   Graphic overlay of compressed and decoded metadata on or near         decoded low bit-rate video to enable real-time operation on         mobile devices and consumer-grade internet connections

The foregoing has outlined, rather broadly, the preferred features of the present disclosure so that those skilled in the art may better understand the detailed description of the disclosure that follows. Additional features of the disclosure will be described hereinafter that form the subject of the claims of the disclosure. Those skilled in the art should appreciate that they can readily use the disclosed conception and specific embodiment as a basis for designing or modifying other structures for carrying out the same purposes of the present disclosure and that such other structures do not depart from the spirit and scope of the disclosure in its broadest form.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 is a schematic illustration of the Media Stream Annotator (MSA), according to an embodiment of the disclosure.

FIG. 2 is a schematic illustration of the Media Annotator flow chart during Third Party Metadata (TPM) ingest, according to an embodiment of the disclosure.

FIG. 3 is a schematic illustration of the Media Annotator flow chart during Human Annotation, according to an embodiment of the disclosure.

FIG. 4 is a schematic illustration of a football miniboard, according to an embodiment of the disclosure.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

The accuracy of any PRS depends on the application of constraints that reduce the number or range of possible results. These constraints can take the form of a priori information, physical and logical constraints, or partial recognition results with high reliability. A priori information for sports includes the type of sport, stadium architecture and location, date and time, teams, players, broadcaster, language, and the media ingest process (e.g., original A/V resolution and transcoding). Physical constraints include camera inertia, camera mount type, lighting, and the physics of players, balls, equipment, courts, fields, and boundaries. Logical constraints include the rules of the game, sports production methods, uniform colors and patterns, and scoreboard operation. Some information can be reliably extracted from the media stream with minimal a priori information and can be used to “boot strap” subsequent recognition processes. For example, the presence of the graphical miniboard overlaid on the game video (shown in FIG. 4) can be detected with only knowledge of the sport and the broadcaster (e.g., ESPN, FOX Sports, etc).

If a live media sporting event is processed in real time, only the current and past media streams are available for pattern recognition and metadata generation. A recorded sporting event can be processed with access to any frame in the entire program. The PRS processing a live event can become more accurate as time progresses since more information is available over time, while any frame from a recorded event can be analyzed repeatedly from the past or the future until maximum accuracy is achieved.

The annotation of a media stream is a tedious and time-consuming task for a human. Visual inspection of text, players, balls, and field/court position is mentally taxing and error prone. Keyboard and mouse entry are needed to enter annotation data but are also error prone and mentally taxing. Human annotation productivity (speed and accuracy) is greatly improved by properly displaying available automatically generated Proposed Annotation Data (PAD) and thereby minimizing the mouse and keyboard input needed to edit and approve the PAD. If the PAD is correct, the Human Annotator (HA) can simultaneously approve the current frame and select the next frame for annotation with only one press of a key or mouse button. The PAD is the current best automatically generated metadata that can be delivered to the user without significant delay. Waiting for the system to maximize the accuracy of the PAD may decrease editing by the HA but will also delay the approval of the given frame.

FIG. 1 shows a Media Stream Annotator (MSA) system according to an embodiment of the disclosure. The MSA ingests both live and archived media streams (LMS 114 and AMS 115), and optional Third Party Metadata (TPM) 101 and input from the HA 118. The PAD is derived from a combination of PRS 108 result metadata and TPM 101. Metadata output by PRS 108 is archived in Metadata Archive 109. If the TPM 101 is available during live events the system can convert the TPM 101 to GTM via the Metadata Mapper 102 and then use the Performance Optimization System (POS) 105 to adjust PRS Input Parameters to improve metadata accuracy for both past (AMS 115) and presently ingested media (LMS 114). The PAD Encoder 110 merges GTM with metadata for each media frame and encodes the PAD into a compressed form suitable for transmission to the Human Annotator User Interface (HAUI) 104 via a suitable network, e.g. Internet 103. This information is subsequently decoded and displayed to the HA, in a form the HA can edit, by a Media Stream and PAD Decoder, Display and Editor (MSPDE) 111. The HAUI also includes a Media Stream Navigator (MSN) 117 which the HA uses to select time points in the media stream whose corresponding frames are to be annotated. A low bit-rate version of the media stream is transcoded from the AMS by a Media Transcoder 116 and then transmitted to the HAUI.

As GTM is generated by the HA 118 and stored in the GTM Archive 106, the POS 105 compares the PRS 108 output metadata to the GTM and detects significant differences between them. During the design and development of the PRS 108, input parameters are set with initial estimated values that produce accurate results on an example set of media streams and associated GTM. These parameter values are adjusted by the POS 105 until the difference between the all GTM and the PRS 108 generated metadata is minimized.

During development (as opposed to live production) the POS 105 does not need to operate in real time and exhaustive optimization algorithms may be used. During a live program the POS 105 should operate as fast as possible to improve PRS 108 performance each time new GTM is generated by the HA 118; faster optimization algorithms are therefore used during a live program. The POS 105 is also invoked when new TPM 101 is converted to GTM.

The choice of distance metric between PRS 108 output metadata and GTM depends on the type of data and the allowable variation. For example, in a presentation of a football game the score information extracted from the miniboard must be absolutely accurate while the spatial position of a player on the field can vary. If one PRS input parameter affects multiple types of results, then the distance values for each type can be weighted in a linear combination of distances in order to calculate a single distance for a given frame or time segment of the game.

A variety of TPM 101 (e.g. from stats.com) is available after a delay period from the live action that can be used as GTM either during development or after the delay period during a live program. Since the TPM is delayed by a non-specific period of time, it must be aligned in time with the program. Alignment can either be done manually, or the GTM can be aligned with TPM 101, and/or the PRS 108 result metadata can be aligned using fuzzy matching techniques.

The PRS 108 maintains a set of state variables that change over time as models of the environment, players, overlay graphics, cameras, and weather are updated. The arrival of TPM 101 and, in turn, GTM can drive changes to both current and past state variables. If the history of the state variables is not stored persistently, the POS 105 would have to start the media stream from the beginning in order to use the PRS 108 to regenerate metadata using new PRS 108 Input Parameters. The amount of PRS 108 state variable information can be large, and is compressed using State Codec 112 into one or more sequences of Group Of States (GOS) such that a temporal section of PRS States is encoded and decoded as a group for greater compression efficiency and retrieval speed. The GOS is stored in a GOS Archive 113. The number of media frames in a GOS can be as few as one.

If the PRS 108 result metadata is stored persistently, the HA can navigate to a past point in time and immediately retrieve the associated metadata or GTM via the PAD Encoder 110, which formats and compresses the PAD for delivery to the HA 118 over the network.

FIG. 2 shows a flow chart for MSA operation, according to an embodiment of the disclosure in which both a live media stream (LMS) and TPM are ingested. All LMS is archived in the AMS (step 201). At system startup, the initial or default values of the GOS are input to the PRS which then starts processing the LMS in real time (step 202). If the PRS does not have sufficient resources to process every LMS frame, the PRS will skip frames to minimize the latency between a given LMS frame and its associated result Metadata (step 203). Periodically, the internal state variable values of the PRS are encoded into GOS and archived (step 204). Finally, the PRS generates metadata which is archived (step 205); the process returns to step 201 and the next or most recent next media frame is ingested. The processing loop 201-205 may iterate indefinitely.

When TPM arrives via the Internet, it is merged with any GTM that exists for that media frame via the Metadata Mapper (step 206). The POS is then notified of the new GTM and generates new sets of PRS Input Parameters, while comparing all resulting Metadata to any corresponding GTM for each set until an optimal set of PRS Input Parameters are found that minimize the global distance between all GTM and the corresponding Metadata (step 207).

FIG. 3 shows a flow chart for MSA operation while the HA approves new GTM. This process operates in parallel with the process shown in the flowchart of FIG. 2. The HA must first select a point on the media stream timeline for annotation (step 301). The HA can find a point in time by dragging a graphical cursor on a media player while viewing a low bit-rate version of the media stream transcoded from the AMS (step 302). The Metadata and any existing GTM associated with the selected time point are retrieved from their respective archives 109, 106 and encoded into the PAD (step 303); transmitted with the Media Stream to the HAUI over the Internet (step 304); and presented to the HA via the HAUI after decoding both PAD and low bit-rate Media Stream (step 305). The HAUI displays the PAD on or near the displayed Media Frame (step 306). The HA compares the PAD with the Media Frame and either clicks on an Approve button 107 or corrects the PAD using an editor and approves the PAD (step 307). After approval of the PAD, the HAUI transmits the corrected and/or approved PAD as new GTM for storage in the GTM Archive (step 308). The POS is then notified of the new GTM and generates new sets of PRS Input Parameters, while comparing all resulting Metadata to any corresponding GTM for each set (step 309) until an optimal set of PRS Input Parameters are found that minimize the global distance between all GTM and the corresponding Metadata (step 310).

If the MSA is operating only on the AMS (and not on the LMS), the POS can perform more exhaustive and time consuming algorithms to minimize the distance between GTM and Metadata; the consequence of incomplete or less accurate Metadata is more editing time for the HA. If the MSA is operating on LMS during live production, the POS is constrained to not update the PRS Input Parameters for live production until the Metadata accuracy is maximized.

The HA does not need any special skills other than a basic knowledge of the media stream content (e.g. rules of the sporting event) and facility with a basic computer interface. PRS performance depends on the collection of large amounts of GTM to ensure that optimization by the POS will result in optimal PRS performance on new media streams. Accordingly, it is usually advantageous to employ multiple HAs for a given media stream. The pool of HAs is increased if the HAUI client can communicate with the rest of the system over the consumer-grade internet or mobile internet connections which have limited capacity. The main consumer of internet capacity is the media stream that is delivered to the HAUI for decoding and display. Fortunately, the bit-rate of the media stream can be greatly lowered to allow carriage over consumer or mobile internet connections by transcoding the video to a lower resolution and quality. Much of the bit-rate needed for high quality compression of sporting events is applied to complex regions in the video, such as views containing the numerous spectators at the event; however, the HA does not need high quality video of the spectators for annotation. Instead, the HA needs a minimal visual quality for the miniboard, player identification, ball tracking, and field markings which is easily achieved with a minimal compressed bit-rate.

The PAD is also transmitted to the HAUI, but this information is easily compressed as text, graphical coordinates, geometric objects, color properties or animation data. All PAD can be losslessly compressed using statistical compression techniques (e.g. zip), but animation data can be highly compressed using lossy animation stream codecs such as can be found in the MPEG-4 SNHC standard tools (e.g. Face and Body Animation and 3D Mesh Coding).

The display of the transmitted and decoded PAD to the HA is arranged for clearest viewing and comparison between the video and the PAD. For example, as shown in FIG. 4, the miniboard content from the PAD should be displayed below the video frame in its own window pane 402 and vertically aligned with the miniboard in the video 401. PAD content relating to natural (non-graphical) objects in the video should be graphically overlayed on the video.

Editing of the PAD by the HA can be done either in the miniboard text window directly for miniboard data or by dragging spatial location data directly on the video into the correct position (e.g. field lines or player IDs). The combined use of low bit-rate, adequate quality video and compressed text, graphics and animation data which is composited on the video results in a HAUI that can be used with low bit-rate internet connections.

Referring back to FIG. 1, The Metadata Archive 109 and the GTM Archive 106 are ideally designed and implemented to provide fast in-memory access to metadata while writing archive contents to disk as often as needed to allow fast recovery after system failure (power outage, etc). In addition to the inherent speed of memory access (vs disk access), the metadata archives should ideally be architected to provide fast search and data derivation operations. Fast search is needed to find corresponding entries in the GTM 106 vs Metadata 109 archives, and to support the asynchronous writes to the GTM Archive 106 from the Metadata Mapper 102. Preferred designs of the data structures in the archives that support fast search include the use of linked lists and hash tables. Linked lists enable insert edit operations without the need to move blocks of data to accommodate new data. Hash tables provide fast address lookup of sparse datasets.

The ingest of TPM 101 requires that the TPM timestamps be aligned with the GTM 106 and Metadata 109 Archive timestamps. This alignment operation may involve multiple passes over all datasets while calculating accumulated distance metrics to guide the alignment. The ingest of multiple overlapping/redundant TPM requires that a policy be established for dealing with conflicting or inconsistent metadata. In case there is conflict between TPMs 101, the Metadata Mapper 102 should ideally compare the PRS 108 generated Metadata 109 to the conflicting TPMs 101 in case other prior knowledge does not resolve the conflict. If the conflict can't be reliably resolved, then a confidence value should ideally be established for the given metadata which is also stored in the GTM 106. Alternatively, conflicting data can be omitted from the GTM 106.

The GTM 106 and Metadata 109 Archives should ideally contain processes for efficiently performing common operations on the archives. For example, if the time base of the metadata needs adjustment, an internal archive process could adjust each timestamp in the whole archive without impacting other communication channels, or tying up other processing resources.

An example of TPM is the game clock from a live sporting event. TPM game clocks typically consist of an individual message for each tick/second of the clock containing the clock value. The delay between the live clock value at the sports venue and the delivered clock value message can be seconds or tens of seconds with variation. The PRS is recognizing the clock from the live video feed and the start time of the game is published in advance. The Metadata Mapper 102 should use all of this information to accurately align the TPM clock ticks with the time base of the GTM 106 and Metadata 109 Archives. At the beginning of the game, there might not be enough data to determine this alignment very accurately, but as time moves forward, more metadata is accumulated and past alignments can be update to greater accuracy.

Another desirable feature of the GTM 106 and Metadata 109 archives is the ability to virtually repopulate the archives as an emulation of replaying of the original ingest and processing of the TPM. This emulation feature is useful for system tuning and debugging.

An exemplary implementation of the system and method discussed herein is during an American football game the play (aka 40/25) clock counts down either 40 or 25 seconds and stops or disappears when the play starts (if it hasn't counted down to zero). If the recognition of the play clock in the PRS is not accurate enough then the detection of the beginning of the play is less reliable. FIG. 4 shows the miniboard play clock with a value of “08” in block 401 and block 402 shows the PRS results from the miniboard including the “08” play clock value. TPM provides live data streams containing the play clock (one value per second) plus the game clock, score, etc. TPM is expected to arrive too late for direct use in real time for game processing but the POS (shown in FIG. 1) compares the TPM play clock values with the PRS game clock output values after aligning their respective timestamps. The digit recognizer in the PRS has operational parameters that are set to default at system initialization. When TPM play clock data enters the POS as GTM the POS adjusts the PRS parameters and stores the digit recognition result for each parameter value. PRS parameters are adjusted and associated results are tested until the parameters are optimized. One optimization technique is to test a range of a given parameter value from a minimum to a maximum value and store the correctness of the result for each parameter value. The optimal parameter value is taken as the value equidistant between the minimum and maximum value that produces a correct result.

An alternative to using TPM for GTM, a Human Annotator (HA) can select a frame of video and annotate the play clock value for that frame. This value becomes the GTM that is input to the POS and PRS parameter optimization proceeds as described above. As multiple digits are input as GTM to the POS, optimal PRS parameter values may not be equal across different digits within a frame or between different frames. In this case the POS can either compute the average of the individual optimal PRS parameter values or search for common PRS parameter values that produce correct results for each digit in the GTM.

Since the POS operates while the PRS is processing the Live Media Streams (LMS), the new optimized PRS parameters can be used immediately if the PRS is running well enough and past PRS output does not have to be recalculated. However, if the PRS is not functioning accurately due to suboptimal parameter values, or the past PRS output must be recomputed, the PRS can look up its past state in the GOS Archive and rerun the game from the past to the present faster than real time (assuming sufficient computing resources to process both the LMS in real time and the AMS faster than real time). When the AMS processing catches up to the present, the PRS will stop processing the AMS and the more accurate Metadata output from the PRS will replace to old Metadata in the Metadata Archive.

COMPILATION OF ACRONYMS

-   AMS Archived Media Stream -   ASR Automatic Speech Recognition -   CV Computer Vision -   GOS Group Of States -   GTM Ground Truth Metadata -   HA Human Annotators -   HAUI Human Annotator User Interface -   HCI Human Computer Interface -   LMS Live Media Stream -   MSA Media Stream Annotator -   MSN Media Stream Navigator -   MSPDE Media Stream and PAD Decoder -   PAD Proposed Annotation Data -   POS Performance Optimization System -   PRS Pattern Recognition System -   TPM Third Party Metadata 

We claim:
 1. A system to annotate media content, characterized by: a pattern recognition system (PRS) 108 having an initial set of input parameters that generates PRS output metadata associated with a frame of a media stream 114; an archive 106 for storing ground truth metadata (GTM) associated with the same frame of the media stream 114; a device to merge the GTM and the PRS output metadata and thereby generate proposed annotation data (PAD) 110; and a user interface 104 for use by a human annotator (HA) 118 including an editor 111 and an input device 104 to approve or edit the PAD 110 for the frame; and an optimization system 105 to adjust input parameters for the PRS 108 to minimize a distance metric corresponding to a difference between the GTM and PRS output metadata.
 2. The system of claim 1 characterized in that the GTM is obtained from one or more of third party metadata 101, archived media stream 115 and the HA
 118. 3. The system of claim 2 characterized in that a time delay between third party metadata 101 and the media stream 114 is corrected by alignment.
 4. The system of claim 2 characterized in that a communication network (103) enables a plurality of HA's 118 to interface with the same media stream
 114. 5. The system of claim 2 characterized in that when the PAD 110 is approved it is converted to GTM.
 6. The system of claim 5 characterized in that when the PAD 110 is approved, it is graphically overlayed on the media stream
 114. 7. The system of claim 1 characterized in that the optimization system 105 adjusts the PRS 108 initial set of input parameters to minimize the difference between the GTM and PRS output metadata thereby increasing accuracy.
 8. The system of claim 1 characterized in that the PRS 108 includes a set of state variables stored as a temporal group 112 adjustable as a group in response to GTM.
 9. A method characterized by: receiving 201 data from a media stream, the data organized into frames 202; processing 203 the data using a pattern recognition system (PRS) 108; storing 204 a state of the PRS 108; generating 205 metadata associated with the frame using the PRS 108; receiving 206 input characterized as ground truth metadata (GTM), into an optimization system; adjusting 207 input parameters for the PRS 108 to minimize a distance metric corresponding to a difference between the GTM and PRS output metadata.
 10. The method of claim 9 characterized in that said input is obtained from one or more of archived media streams 115, third party metadata 101 and one or more human annotators
 118. 11. The method of claim 10 characterized in that subsequent to receiving said input, said GTM and said metadata associated with said PRS are temporally aligned.
 12. The method of claim 10 characterized in that said GTM and said metadata associated with said PRS 108 are continuously stored and memory and periodically stored to disk thereby enabling fast recovery from system failure.
 13. A method characterized by: receiving 301 from a human annotator (HA), via a human annotator user interface (HAUI), information regarding a time point selected by the HA on a timeline of the media stream; merging 303 existing ground truth metadata (GTM) relating to a media frame corresponding to the selected time point with pattern recognition system (PRS) output metadata relating to said media frame, thereby generating proposed annotation data (PAD) 110 for the media frame; displaying 306 the media frame and the PAD 110 to the HA 118; receiving 307 input from the HA 118 including correction and/or approval of the PAD 110, where approved PAD 110 is characterized as new GTM related to the selected time point; storing 308 the new GTM; comparing 309 the PRS output metadata and the new GTM related to the selected time point; and adjusting 310 PRS input parameters so that a distance metric corresponding to a difference between the new GTM and PRS output metadata related to the selected time point is minimized.
 14. The method of claim 13 characterized in that said GTM is obtained from one or more of archived media streams 115, third party metadata 101, said human annotators 118 and other human annotators.
 15. The method of claim 14 characterized in that when said human annotator 118 approves said PAD 110, said PAD 110 is graphically overlaid on said media stream.
 16. A method characterized by: generating output metadata associated with a frame of a media stream, output by a pattern recognition system (PRS) 108; storing in an archive 106 input from a human annotator (HA) 118 related to the frame, characterized as ground truth metadata (GTM); merging the GTM and the PRS 108 output metadata to thereby generate proposed annotation data (PAD) 110; and displaying the PAD 110 to the HA 118 by a user interface 104; receiving via the user interface an input from the HA 118 indicating approval of the GTM for the frame; and adjusting input parameters for the PRS 108 using an optimization system 105, to minimize a distance metric corresponding to a difference between the GTM and the PRS output metadata.
 17. The method of claim 16 characterized in that said GTM is obtained from one or more of archived media streams 115, third party metadata 101, said human annotators 118 and other human annotators.
 18. The method of claim 17 characterized in that when said human annotator 118 approves said PAD, said PAD is graphically overlaid on said media stream. 